[EwanToo]

You can have a lot of fun with Pi's, but I'm not sure I want to build a multi-TB NAS using a Raspberry Pi with a pretty rare addon board..

If you do want something like this, I think the ODROID-HC4[1] is probably a better option.

1 - https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4

[magicalhippo]

Or just use USB3 - SATA connectors...

[fogihujy]

Yeah, USB drives with their own power supplies work very well with the Pi, but I can imagine high workloads could quickly run into problems and/or bottlenecks.

[magicalhippo]

True, though that bottleneck would mostly be with the Pi itself. After all it only has GbE built-in, a single HD will easily saturate that for sequential loads or all loads for a SSD.

I have 8 disks hooked up to a Pi4 through USB3-SATA[1] with external 12V, works quite well in terms of reliability (had to turn on quirks mode[2] though). As I mentioned the main limitation is the single 1GbE interface, but this is just for archive data so.

[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000001204302.html

[2]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931

[fogihujy]

Yep, I've also noticed some unreliability when doing things like adding a mirror drive; at some point the USB controller just seems to fall off the horse and everything crashes.

My setup mainly streams video/music over wifi and it's rock solid at lower speeds. I wouldn't rely on it for any heavy duty storage needs though.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

2 disks is pretty limited, is there a 4+ disk version of this?